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redletterdave (2493036) writes "Facebook owns virtually all the aspects of the social experience—photos (Instagram), status updates (Facebook), location services (Places)—but now, Facebook is transitioning from a simple social network to a full-fledged technology company that rivals Google, moonshot for moonshot. Yet, it's Facebook's corporate control of traffic that leads many to distrust the company. In a sense, people are stuck. When the time comes for someone to abandon Facebook, whether over privacy concerns or frustration with the company, Facebook intentionally makes it hard to leave. Even if you delete your account, your ghost remains—even when you die, Facebook can still make money off you. And that's not behavior fit for a company that's poised to take over the future."

Settling for the lesser of two evils is not only a false defense, but a mindset of the enslaved.

And ironically, replace "Facebook" with "Hollywood" in the summary above. When I read about profiting after you die, the first thing I thought of were celebrities. Death is not a guarantee of limited revenue. And because of narcissism within social media, everyone is in fact a celebrity now. At least according to Facebook who want to immortalize you forever within their revenue engine.

Well, there's at least one sentence that's essentially different: "even when you die, Facebook can still make money off you."

Google doesn't (as far as I know) sell user information to advertisers. They exclusively use their own analytics; all an advertiser can do is submit their target demographics and keywords, and let Google do the math. While they're both huge storehouses of personal information, the big G is monolithic and generally non-porous—unless you're a malignant security agency, at least. If you're not using their services (at least passively), you're definitely not making them money.

This doesn't make them Totally Cool Groovy Guys You Should Trust With Anything, but it does make them naive ideologues surfing along the edge of a slippery slope rather than the outright thuggery of Facebook and other traditional advertisers—FB is more like a spam subscription; once you get signed up, you can be certain that your private information will propagate across the cosmos for eternity.

A few years ago, I was working for a manufacturer in R+D, developing an accessory for one of our products. One of the parts of that accessory required a plastic part with very specific features (it was a living hinge, but with certain requirements that made polypropylene unsuitable).

I used Google to find out what other types of plastics might be suitable, and quickly finally found a material that would work. A rather obscure, rather expensive plastic with a barbaric name. I Googled some more about that plastic, then called it a day and went home.

The VERY NEXT DAY, I got a spam in my work mailbox from a Chinese manufacturer of that very plastic, offering me prices by the ton.

It could be a coincidence, but as your story leaves the name of what you googled conspicuously absent, you've conveniently made it impractical for anyone to even attempt to prove or disprove a causative factor in this regard. This tactic is a staple used by conspiracy theorists everywhere and is often indicative of something that isn't logically sustainable from an objective standpoint if all the facts were actually revealed.

Saying there is no conspiracy involved generally leads people to believe there is one.

I do know what you are saying at least in part, but google uses all sorts of tracking to find you. Google range rover in IE without adblock and watch for the next month. rage rover ads will feature promentaly on every website you visit even if google has nothing to do with them.

I use adblock on safari at home and I don't have those issues. turn off adblock for a while and the web becomes something a lot messier.

Saying there is no conspiracy involved generally leads people to believe there is one.

Aaw man, I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't aren't I?:)

Okay look, Google is a company that scares the bejesus out of me, and I believe the things they develop and invest in lead the world to a dangerously slippery slope. I also think they don't publicize all the things they do because they believe people aren't ready to hear what they have in store for them. But I *emphatically* don't believe there is ANY conspiracy

Saying there is no conspiracy involved generally leads people to believe there is one.

Aaw man, I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't aren't I?:)

Okay look, Google is a company that scares the bejesus out of me, and I believe the things they develop and invest in lead the world to a dangerously slippery slope. I also think they don't publicize all the things they do because they believe people aren't ready to hear what they have in store for them. But I *emphatically* don't believe there is ANY conspiracy involved.

If you want a real conspiracy theory take a very close look at how precisely Google received its initial start-up money and what government agency was involved. It's not really so absurd to posit that the government makes "investments" in things it believes will serve its interests just like businesses do.

And if you want Google search without Google tracking, try using Startpage [startpage.com]. They conduct Google searches on your behalf and act as a proxy.

I've gotten quite a few random spam messages from Chinese industry, despite being a software engineer at an academic institution with absolutely nothing to do with any product development or manufacturing whatsoever. I've gotten offers for piping, ceramics, and a wide variety of plastics. At this very moment, I am reading a spam message from Kevin, who informs me he represents "one of the best digital images retouching/editing professionals located in China."

Same here. No attempts at obfuscation or what have you, either. And I used to get similar messages on Skype before I started blocking anyone not on my contact list. Now I just get an occasional contact request from someone at some Chinese company. Pipes, plastics, wire/cable, and construction equipment.

I was passing through Shenzhen a couple of years ago, and the bus went right by the office (very large building, very prominent signage) of one of the companies I'd received mail from. I can't recall the name

Oh. My bro-in-law's response might seem a bit more relevant if I'd remembered to mention that my wife is from Guangzhou, and that her brother lives and owns a large and fairly successful business there.:)

Why would you suspect Google? A more probable explanation would be you visited sites affiliated with the manufacturers of said plastic looking for information about it from your work connection. They saw your domain name accessing their site, looked you up on the corporate web page and sent you an offer.

Why must it be Google and not one of the many links you clicked? Do you have any clue how easy it is to track down an email address via the work IP address, normal information a browser provides, and five minutes of effort.

Google doesn't (as far as I know) sell user information to advertisers. They exclusively use their own analytics; all an advertiser can do is submit their target demographics and keywords, and let Google do the math.

s/Google/Facebook/ and that's true. Anybody with a Facebook account can create an advertising account and see what any advertiser sees for targeting options. Try it out, it's eye-opening. You can only provide ads to Facebook users through Facebook. Here's one step further from the company's 10-K filing with the SEC:

We generate a substantial majority of our revenue from advertising. The loss of marketers, or reduction in spending by marketers with Facebook, could seriously harm our business. The substantial majority of our revenue is currently generated from third parties advertising on Facebook. For 2013, 2012, and 2011, advertising accounted for 89% , 84% and 85%, respectively, of our revenue.

We generate the substantial majority of our revenue from selling advertising placements to marketers.

In 2013, developers received more than $2.1 billion from transactions enabled by our Payments infrastructure. While mobile applications can also integrate with Facebook, mobile applications do not process transactions using our Payments infrastructure.

(*.3 = 630 million).

If I compare that to Facebook's income statement, that leaves 235 million (3% of revenue) in loose change revenue. So basically, Facebook isn't running around making money ex

Facebook's position on providing large amounts of user data to its business partners has been the subject of scrutiny a few times [wikipedia.org]. It remains unclear exactly how much stuff developers like Zynga have been able to access. There was also a series of events a couple of years ago [wikipedia.org] where privacy controls were updated and set to overly permissive defaults—which is either spectacularly bad management (given how much bad PR it generated each and every time) or a bribed enablement of data-scraping.

As for sending email to a Gmail user, that's what I meant by "passive" use of Google's services, although I should note that if your e-mail never gets read, it cannot make Google money, just like a site with Google ads on it that never gets visited. You're really only an incidental bystander in that situation.

Realistically, Google wasn't founded by a guy who stole passwords to read other people's email. It wasn't founded by a guy who told some people he would build their idea, then went around and built it for himself, lying to them to the last possible minute. Facebook was founded by, and is still run by that guy. Furthermore there is no reason to believe he's changed.

Google at least attempts to be non-evil, and have sacrificed profit for their principles. People who are upset with them mainly disagree that collecting personal information for the purpose of custom-tailored ad-serving is evil, but that's controversial (really, people who do it feel they are helping users). My primary complaints with Google is that they have too many bugs in their software and don't support backwards compatibility, but that's off-topic.

It often happens in a conversation about one thing, particularly a complex and nuanced thing, that it will bring up other similar things because they are related in some way. The resistance of some to this natural conversational process never made much sense.

I could speculate that you have a loyalty to Google that you cannot realistically expect them to reciprocate (you do know that, right?), except I've seen lots of people display this tendency who obviously had no such motivation. Some people just li

It often happens in a conversation about one thing, particularly a complex and nuanced thing, that it will bring up other similar things because they are related in some way. The resistance of some to this natural conversational process never made much sense.

I could speculate that you have a loyalty to Google that you cannot realistically expect them to reciprocate (you do know that, right?), except I've seen lots of people display this tendency who obviously had no such motivation. Some people just like to complain.

Your speculation is incorrect. Pointing out that Google may have issues in no meaningful way adds to the discussion regarding Facebook's well known issues. It's a rhetorical trick to distract from the fact that Facebook has issues.

I'm happy to discuss Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. But when someone clearly points out people don't trust Facebook, and for good reason, no value is added to the conversation when someone says, "But... Google!"

Google believes in a panopticon world in which anonymity and the right to privacy has disappeared.

This is false. Yes, yes, Eric Schmidt said things to that effect a few times; perhaps he does believe it. But Larry Page does not, nor do the vast majority of Google engineers who actually make the decisions about what Google does. It's also worth pointing out that the Buzz mistakes led to Google signing an FCC consent decree which includes regular third-party privacy audits, with serious penalties for failing.

Why a lack of anonymity is a nightmare to you? Is it because you don't live in a free country and the only way you can express your ideas without going to jail afterward is with anonymity?

In no country can you express any actually significant idea without making enemies. Powers that be want nothing so much as status quo, since that means they stay on top, and any significant idea by definition threatens it. Anonymity is absolutely vital for any society, since it allows unpleasant truths to be expressed without fear of legal or extralegal punishment, whether it comes in the form of jail, vigilantes or unemployment.

Furthermore, as Manning and Snowden showed, even nominally free countries tend to have boils of corruption which need to be exposed to be healed - and we can't rely on always having a hero ready when we need one, thus such exposition needs to be possible anonymously.

And of course there's the "knowledge is power" -aspect, where the state being able to casually record everything its citizens do online (and increasingly offline) simply makes it too powerful to resist the temptation to abuse said power.

- Google lets you export ALL OF YOUR DATA, 100%, in full, in open formats.

- Google lets you close your account and delete it, leaving no traces. This includes Google Plus and all posts shared.

- The majority of Google's services offer open APIs and follow open standards and allow third party integrations.

- Heck, many of their products they fully open source and give to the whole community, including Chrome, ChromeOS, Android, GWT, etc

Compare this to facebook. You can't export anything out of facebook in any kind of open format. You can not easily delete your account, even when you do your pictures and images remain on other people's accounts. Facebook offers very few open APIs to integrate with it, they want you to instead write apps that run ON the platform so they can control and monetize everything you create.

How do you know that? Did Google offer you to audit their systems to verify what you believe?

More likely, Google, being an enormous information gathering company that live off that information, keep all your data and add a new tidbit of information to your file mentioning that on date D, you closed your account and deleted it.

If you truly believe Google's data retention policy is any different from Facebook's, you're delusional. And even if

Facebook explicitly says they do not allow you to delete your account. They simply DO NOT ALLOW IT. And all data you post on facebook is theirs, they claim ownership of it. So no wonder they don't allow you to delete it.

Google allows you to delete your account and tells you exactly what happens when that occurs. http://www.pcworld.com/article... [pcworld.com] . And they claim ownership of nothing.

The companies attitude toward privacy and accountability are so different it is not even in the same hemisphere.

Facebook explicitly says they do not allow you to delete your account.

I left Facebook a few months ago and specifically requested deletion, not deactivation. There was a 14 day waiting period, during which time I could log back into my account and reset the clock, but supposedly at the end of those 14 days my account was gone for good. From what I can tell [facebook.com] they still allow you to do this: "If you don't think you'll use Facebook again, you can request to have your account permanently deleted. Please keep in mind that you won't be able to reactivate your account or retrieve anything you've added."

Frankly leaving social media was the best thing I ever did. It's a bit of a PITA with regards to those friends who seemingly only know how to communicate via FB, but even they eventually came around and started calling, texting, or e-mailing me. Only one of my friends really whined about it, because she doesn't have a cell and can't text, but she eventually got used to e-mailing me.

Which is why we need a pure peer to peer social messaging system. Call it torrents for facebook. There is no reason for centralisation of social data. Features like- meta data and messaging data is spread around different peers as encrypted chunks so it can be rebuit on any new device you sign up to.- grouping like google circles.- expiry option on messages and images.

I'd mod you up but feel the need to contribute to this topic. Where are the Facebook competitors? Everyone uses Facebook while also bitching and moaning about the lack of control and privacy, you would think the market is ripe for take over by an ethical/open competitor so where is it?
All you need is the friends/status update/post pictures/IM platform along with some form of ownership and freedom from ads and you'd be set. For revenue I think the world is ready to pay for what they get model (free is not a

Yes, there are a number: diaspora [linux-magazine.com], Friendica [wikipedia.org], and an emerging system based around RSS [wikipedia.org], this type of thing is usually called the federated social web [w3.org].
This [squte.com] is my own overview.

meta data and messaging data is spread around different peers as encrypted chunks

federated social networks will go the same way e-mail has gone: yes, there's tons of minor e-mail servers, but a few large companies control a very large fraction of e-mail traffic (espeically for personal use) because running a server is hard.

For a federated system based on an open protocol, it should be possible to have a desktop client which installs in a few clicks.
You can install a mail server yourself, of course, but the main barrier to this is needing a domain name pointing to it.
For a desktop 'node' of a P2P system, either it is always on, or you have a name resolution system built into the protocol, or you have to have a domain name and a static IP (or use a dyndns service). All of these have downsides.
A workaround [squte.com] is to use the email

Obviously you need to provide payment information to purchase a for-pay product. You'll need to find a better counter-example against "demanded payment for services" than "using a paid service" I'm afraid.

There's plenty of sites that require you to give them CC info even when they're (supposedly) not charging you for anything. Often claimed to be a form of adult verification (and thus unsurprisingly mostly a tactic of adult sites) which is absolut

There's plenty of sites that require you to give them CC info even when they're (supposedly) not charging you for anything. Often claimed to be a form of adult verification (and thus unsurprisingly mostly a tactic of adult sites) which is absolutely stupid since you can get a CC well before 18 in many jurisdictions so on top of being invasive and probably untrustworthy, it couldn't possibly even accomplish the claimed purpose.

I'm ignorant about the back-end of credit card systems, so this raises a couple of questions for me.

While you can get a CC under the age of 18, doesn't the credit card issuer have information like your date of birth? Can merchants request this information if they can uniquely identify the account (by the CC number and expiration date, say)?

Facebook has no future. Their business plan is to continue to get people to come and give up their personal information for free, and then sell that information for profit to everyone else they can think of. The well is already starting to dry up on that. Unless you expect the world to end in the next 5 years, saying that facebook will take over the future is ridiculous.

Facebook has no future. Their business plan is to continue to get people to come and give up their personal information for free, and then sell that information for profit to everyone else they can think of. The well is already starting to dry up on that. Unless you expect the world to end in the next 5 years, saying that facebook will take over the future is ridiculous.

You're more fucking delusional than Tinkerbell on acid if you think for one second an entire generation is going to step away from the "Free" button when paying for anything online.

Seriously, I can't stop laughing over the absurdity of this...this brings ignorance to a whole new level.

And you might want to trace the money and ownership of most of the shit you use online before making claims as to where monopolies exist and where they do not.

Or even on the internet. People can and do be social on the internet without putting Facebook in the middle. They share photos, exchange emails, tell their friends about their new dog or latest breakup all without FB being involved... as astonishing as that seems.

Facebook is for idiots. Always has been. It's the AOL of the modern internet, and as such, it is fine that it keeps existing, because it keeps the idiots occupied and away from the rest of the interwebs.

Not to mention the social backlash you could face when all of your Facebook 'friends' discover that you are no longer on their friend list. I think that is the biggest reason why it is so persistent and why it is so hard to leave even when one wants to ditch the social networking super giant.

I feel the only way people will be able to start leaving the network without fear of social backlash is when there is an 'organic' event where everyone you know is leaving for possibly the next best thing at which time

I've been pondering on how toget rid of my facebook account. Is it possible to get your account suspended by posting filth and other matirial that's against their terms of use? I've heard about people getting their account blocked. Instead of panicking over it, I want to embrace it. Good idea?

Every day I'm more and more glad that I have never had an account, and never will.

I'm in the same boat, but I'm not deluding myself by thinking that Facebook doesn't have a shadow account for me -- this has been confirmed to have been done in the past. Facebook is probably aware that I exist, and they obtain some benefit from being able to identify me in photos or posts (for example) and tracking my actions.

Speak for yourself champ. I've had numerous women admit not just infidelities but actively criminal abuse of the immigration system to me on facebook for some fucked up reason, which was duly reported to the relevant authorities. Long live facebook's long lived memory!

Yes, as everyone says, the "information is forever"...whatever. I've been on the internet since roughly 1998, and it's relatively challenging to find information on me from that far back. Plus - what benefit would it serve?

As long as you are still on FB, they are getting current information to sell to the highest bidder. Next week that information won't be as relevant. Next month, even less so. In five years? Who in the hell is going to give a shit what you were doing five years

It's a big process that most end users don't understand and can't resolve without a lot of help. For a long time I simply didn't care, so I didn't bother with much extra security. It's slow going as I migrate, but essentially, if you can find information about me online, I intend it to be there;)

Besides...I don't like to boast about it, because some people take it as a challenge:p It's easier to be hidden when nobody is looking:D

As myspace proved out, the social market is incredibly fickle. Facebook's billboard model is only part of the market, and there are already signs that communication is shifting towards real time. That market isn't so clear, with plenty of fragmentation across LINE, the weibos in asia and facebook's relatively poor sticker offering trying to catch up. WeChat may have been pricey, but a necessary addition to admit they missed the boat on this angle.

I had no choice but to deinstall it on all of my Android devices. The old version no longer works and the new one wants permission to access pretty much everything I own... all my contacts, all my accounts, location, phone numbers, make phone calls and texts, god knows what else. Everything.

It's insane. I will not give Facebook access to all of that stuff. They can go stuff it. Nor will I give third party sites FB access for validation since that also means they can snarf my friends list.

I'm still able to run the FB app on IOS because that at least allows me to deny FB permission the access. Android though is out of the question.

Neither Google nor Facebook has ever successfully built a product users will actually pay for. (Google's Nexus phones are rebranded LG, Samsung, and Asus products). For both, all significant revenue is from ads.
Yet both have now acquired hardware companies. Now they have to make a business out of them. They may not succeed.

Google acquired Motorola and had no idea what to do with it. Now they're selling it. Google has an automatic driving R&D project, but they acquired DARPA Grand Challenge technology and seem no closer to deployment than a few years ago.
Google acquired a half dozen advanced robotics R&D firms, but none of those have commercial products or profits yet. Google now has to build an entire industrial business in robotics, which is slow, hard, and will take years to pay off. Google hasn't shown the corporate patience for that. Google products that didn't take off quickly are usually killed. I'm worried that Google will end up trashing the US robotics industry once they realize it's not a Make Money Fast business.

Facebook hasn't really tried yet in hardware. But they have no expertise at it. The Oculus Rift is still a prototype/low volume device. Facebook has never run a factory. They'll have to outsource manufacturing, which means everybody else will be making goggles if it turns out to be profitable to do so.

That sounds far-fetched. My social experience involves hanging out with my family, chatting with coworkers, emailing some people, and chatting up people at the coffee shop. No Facebook whatsoever, and I doubt I'm alone.

Seriously anyone who has been on the "public" internet since say 1995 knows there are plenty of places to have "social" experiences on the internet from IRC chat to community forums. I see dedicated Facebook users as social retards who just follow the new cool trends and are too lazy to be involved in several "social" fronts on the intertubes. There``s no helping them they are who they are and will follow other to the next cool thing.

I get more than enough social experience from running game servers and interacting with the game players, chatting on irc and visiting and posting on different interest forums.

There is a difference. Facebook is socializing with people you know in the real world. I don't think anyone else has as good a platform for that. Forums are a different beast, where you mostly mingle with people you don't know with names like "future assassin" and "hodet".

Not defending it, I don't have a fb account, but I have plenty of family who enjoy using it. Whatever floats ones boat I say.

I don't think FB will 'Power the Future' because there's a lot of stuff they simply can't get right. Take their new search. If I enter "James Bond" into a Facebook search, my expectation is that the first thing it will search is my friend's feeds, followed by the feeds of companies and organization I like, followed by public feeds - Returning "James Bond"- related Facebook posts. Instead it just does a lousy web search. Why?

Or take ads. I'm a Facebook regular, posting daily. Yet FB has never been able to serve an ad up to me about anything I care about. Never. Not once.

...and my feed is just a total dog's breakfast with FB selectively choosing what to show me. I know I can pick "show recent" but the setting doesn't stick for more than 48 hours or so...

the young people are leaving facebook and soon the jackals will start to smell blood. None of the reasons listed to make it hard to leave facebook are really that sticky. It is not like they own your house. Next big thing and people will stampede out of facebook like they did myspace.

Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Amazon, and all the other information companies do the same. They collect your data they analyze it and they try to sell your pattern to everybody who can pay for it. So why single out Facebook? Facebook most likely has the biggest problem in terms of reputation, but soon other companies reputation will be harmed too. The only problem that could happen to Facebook is another online-application which is able replace it without providing adverts to the users. Most li

Facebook is transitioning from a simple social network to a full-fledged technology company that rivals Google

In what world is Facebook a full-fledged technology company that rivals Google? Let's see what each company offers me:Google's search engine was a big thing when it started; it meant that you didn't have to use a shitload of search engines to find stuff (meta-search engines, anyone?) and now it rightfully dominates this market. Google gave me free email that didn't suck (well maybe some redesigns did) and has tons of space: people left Hotmail and never had to look back. Google Maps and Earth are just mind-blowing if you come to think of it, so I don't really have to comment on those. Google bought YouTube, and now serves us our vids, too. Google has stuff like the Google Art project that produces high-quality scans of artwork around the globe and silently delivers them to Wikipedia, so that we can all enjoy them for free. Google produced the OS that powers my phone and its browser, so that we get some diversity at least in the mobile world and don't get MS and Apple dominating that market as well (admittedly, it gets boring).

With Facebook, I can stay in touch with my friends that are in remote locations, upload my photos for them to see, and watch theirs. There is also some simple gaming going on (I'm not into it, but lots of people are). Oh, and with Instagram I can apply crappy filters to my photos. All these things, btw, I can do with Google+, but Google was late in the social media space, so I prefer FB since pretty much everybody that I know is already there.

FB is not a fully fledged tech company, they are a website for wasting your time. That's about it. I don't care how many little old ladies play candy crush or whatever the newest hot app is on FB, this won't make them a tech company unless they start developing some new tech. Continuously. If Google has been as stagnant as FB they wouldn't have gone past the development of their search engine.

IAll these things, btw, I can do with Google+, but Google was late in the social media space, so I prefer FB since pretty much everybody that I know is already there.

That and the fact that G+ sucks arse. If G+ was exactly like Facebook, then Facebook would already be dead. Instead Google ran their nerd wand over it and made a complete mess of an interface that no-one can figure out what is going on. I prefer FB because the interface makes sense, and both my children and parents can use it without asking for help. G+ fails that test miserably.

Here's a new law of physics. If your CEO is hated by everyone in the world, your company is screwed. Oh, hi, Facebook and Zuckerberg. He's an arrogant, privacy-hating hate magnet. He's openly stated that he doesn't care about pissing off the users. The board should fire that hoodie-wearing disease and turn Facebook around. Then he can go hang out with John McAfee, Steve Balmer, Meg Whitman (people hate her, look it up), and um...Hitler in their own little hate club on their own little island.

Facebook does allow users to "delete" their accounts. I'm sure ithey're not deleted out of backups and archives. However, the issue of a former user having a "ghost" of themselves on their systems isn't as valuable as you might think just because a snapshot of yourself obviously isn't a reflection of your current self (since we all change over time). The information is valuable if it's accurate/up-to-date. I can imagine a situation where a college user with Democratic leanings deletes their account and

Remember RSS feeds? Back in the day when Feedburner wasn't owned by Facebook, you could install a desktop client or the sorely missed Google Reader to stay in touch with the sites and blogs that you felt were important. You had total control over what you wanted to read or subscribe to. If you ran a website, you put up an orange RSS icon, or let Firefox auto detect the feed and let the user decide what they wanted. RSS was (is) an open standard for publishing updates to a web site.I would've said that Twitter & Facebook have killed it completely, but let's face it, RSS never really went mainstream. Google did not do enough to popularize Reader - just a core bunch of users wailed when they decided to shut down the service. Even Facebook had an RSS feed of the wall back in 2008 before they changed it to the 'news' feed format. Probably not the first time an open technology standard was thwarted by a large company, and won't be the last.

To be fair RSS was hitting mainstream when it go whacked. It was where Bluetooth was right before the headset rage set in (2003?) and pulled it out of the limbo it had been in between the wants of nerds and the cheapness of manufacturers and most consumers. The 4 factors that hurt RSS in my mind were: 1. non-obvious pronunciation to laymen/not memorable name- even Bluetooth, Firefox, and Google are easier to remember. 2. Similarly it's lack of corporate co-opting and the ensuing pitch as the "next big thing

The funny thing about "RoK" to me is that I think of kings as highly feminized men. They wear (er... wore) dresses, they wield a lot of power over other people, they constantly mingle with other powerful people, and they're very rich. Lots of women just find that irresistible, which is too bad, because if they didn't, maybe something would have been invented during the middle ages other than the bubonic plague.